Marked By Rain
by Camikyra1
Summary: The dissolve of Team Rocket causes Jessie and James to unceremoniously part ways. James struggles to deal with the loss of his oldest friend. A short one-shot.


Gray furls of clouds rolled over Celadon. They blanketed the sky and sent the Pidgeys skittering away in little black v's. Great raindrops splashed into the cobblestone streets. First a few, then a steady drumming, and soon umbrellas whisked open as people dashed for cover. Then the streets were empty.

Just great. The gods must have known what a day it had already been for me. Just when I thought I'd been reaching a point where maybe I'd go out and find something to do, here's a beautiful, soaking rainstorm. The depression had been bad over the past few days, which was odd, because it was the first time I'd really felt anything since everything blew over all those months ago. It must have been nearly a year, now, I suppose.

We were far off in Lilycove Town when we heard the news. It was really pretty remarkable. The government has honed in on Giovanni (and the rest of Team Rocket corporate) and had the syndicate disbanded. Of course, Giovanni was placed under lock and key, as were several of his key players, and those Rocket members who were easily located, as well.

As for the rest of us, it was just a matter of word of mouth. We were just outside of town, and Jessie and I just had the most inane argument about what had happened with Ash earlier that day. I can't even remember what it was now. But I can remember how mad she was. It was like I had never done a single thing right. And of course, Meowth took her side. When doesn't he? But here we were, me trying desperately to get a word in edgewise while traipsing through the brambles on our way back to Cove Lily Motel. What a sight we must've been for those Team Magma kids who came sprinting past us. Man, those scouts just look younger every day. Anyway, it was those Magma members who told us hurriedly that it was in our best interest to shed our Rocket uniforms, before any of the Jennys caught us in our black and whites.

When we got back to town, it was just chaos. People had banners in windows, shouting of the Rockets' demise. Declaring that the days of terrorism were over. I took my jacket off in a frenzy, and stuffed it in a nearby garbage can. Jessie didn't. I remember being so infuriated when someone lobbed a bottle her way.

The next day, Meowth was gone. He left us a note saying how the days spent with us were wonderful, but how he needed to find himself now. I felt betrayed, but also strangely proud for him. We let him go, agreed not to look for him. But, boy, how I cried that night when I realized our dear friend was truly gone.

We spent the next few days back out in the woods, trying in vain to gather information from anyone in the organization. Who do we report to? Where do we go? What do we do now? But generally, the tone we'd picked up on in Lilycove proved to be true.

Team Rocket was just done. That was all.

We didn't talk much about it. Well, that is to say, Jessie didn't talk much about it. All of my speculative questions were met with single word answers. Clipped and fresh. I knew she was upset. And she had every reason to be. I was upset, too. But Team Rocket had been 15 years of our lives. We had never considered anything else. We had nowhere to go, no one to stay with, no one to feed us.

There were times when my mind entertained the thought of this day. Romanticized it, even. I dreamt of the days when Giovanni would hand us a pink slip. Sometimes this dismissal would be accompanied by a meager severance allowance.

I knew exactly what I would do then. I would go into town and buy Jessie the most beautiful dress she'd ever seen, and I'd go back, and tell her that I loved her. And she'd say she'd always loved me too, and we'd be so happy living in our post-Rocket lives. Maybe we'd have a nice little apartment in the city somewhere – anywhere – it didn't matter. But I always knew that's how it would happen.

But to be honest, when the moment came, that old fantasy never surfaced again. There was just sulking Jessie in our leaking cabin in the brush outside a city that wanted our heads. And then, one day, one of those red uniforms showed up through the yellowed window pane. When I answered the door, the Magma addressed only Jessie. They wanted Jessie to join them. Only Jessie. She was quiet.

As soon as he left, I felt the frustration swell in me.

"Can you believe the nerve of them?" I remember saying to her.

She could only say, "I don't know, James."

And those four words made me angrier than I'd ever felt. But I didn't let her know that. Of course not.

The next morning, my eyelids cracked open from my place on the rotting wood floor to see those familiar black boots creeping their way out the door. She moved quietly, on tip-toes. Surely so as not to wake me. This was just Jessie lately, though. She was always in and out. Always creeping. So I let her go. I felt my heart sink. When the sun came up, I found her Rocket uniform folded neatly in a pile with her sleeping bag. With it, a note, written on the back of a crumpled receipt. It simply said: "It's been fun. Please don't look for me".

The next week feel like a dizzy dream. I didn't sleep much, I didn't eat much. Of course, I looked for her. I knocked on every door in Lilycove. I talked to nearly every soul. I even held a young Magma by his collar. He looked so scared. He only made me realize how long it had been since I was a recruit like him.

And by the end of that week, I was just so angry. So very angry that she could just leave me, after all that we had known together. After all the growing we had done together. With all the growing we still had left to do together. I didn't know how to be anyone without her. I was so infuriated, that I wrote off the word "love" altogether. How could I have ever loved someone who so obviously never loved me? And she never had, I know it now. It amazes me that I could have ever been so foolish. It was just sort of numbing. I was so baffled, I suddenly could no longer feel anything for her.

So I picked myself up, and took the next boat back to Kanto. Celadon City was so ravaged after the dissolve of Team Rocket. But it made things cheap for a guy who had nothing. Cheap, and familiar. So I stayed.

That was ten months ago. Ten months, and I'm just now starting to feel any sort of hurt over the situation. Ten months and I've not heard anything. Not from Jessie, not from Meowth. How? How could you spend 15 years with someone and simply leave them over the course of a week? I wanted so badly to pick up the phone, to call everyone we'd ever known, now. To ask them, where is she, how could she? Did they know? Could they have known?

I started to write letters to her. Terrible, venomous letters, full of words that I wasn't sure I meant. Full of everything I knew I would say to her if we ever crossed paths again. How I knew we should be together, and why I knew that, and how could she not see that? Of course, without an addressee, the letters just sat in a dusty, brooding pile. And everyday I told myself I'd stop writing them, and every night my pen met the paper again.

But tonight, with this pounding rain and my aching chest, I forced myself to get up and walk out into the rain. It drummed violently on my head as soon as I shut the door behind me, and I immediately wondered if this was a bad idea. A nagging feeling in my head told me this was a bad idea. But at what point would I allow myself to be free of that nagging feeling?

So off I went. I walked and walked. South out of Celadon, clear through the woods. And boy, it felt so good. I felt like the depression was washing right off of me. My shoes sloshed, my jacket felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. But I was addicted to this feeling, now. I thought maybe I could just spend the rest of my life walking. Just walking.

My god, what had my life become? Here I was, no longer young, with nothing to do, no goals, and no one, rain-soaked and dirty. It was funny really, so very funny. The sound of my laugh was stifled by insulating rain. The ocean seemed so expansive when I reached the coast. So gray, so limitless. I collapsed against a tree by the beach, laughing and laughing at the thought of myself, alone in the rain here. And for the first time since Jessie had left, I cried. I cried sobbing, reckless tears. I cried until I was sure my heart would just burst inside my chest.

Every part of me ached by the time my feet decided to begin to shuffle back to Celadon. When the rain finally began to die down, it was well into the night. I was glad no one could see me like this, soaked to the bone and eyes bloodshot.

I thought about all the good times we had together. I thought about all the nights we huddled together in subzero temperatures. I thought about all the times we shared just a tiny morsel of bread for days. I thought about laughing in the woods over all those silly little things that now seemed treasures locked away in a chest I no longer had the key for.

But she was gone, those memories with her. I felt like I could live my life now. I felt renewed. Jessie was gone. Jessie had never felt anything for me. Jessie would never be a part of my life again.

Jessie was sitting at the tiny folding table in the living room of my apartment when I flicked the lights on.

The only sound I heard was the sound of water droplets running off my clothes and hitting the rubber doormat. When she stood up and pushed the chair away, the sound was deafening. My heart began to beat a frantic racing beat.

"Listen," she said, shaking her head and leaning on the table. "You don't have to say anything, just hear me out." She sounded tired, exasperated. And judging by her disheveled Magma uniform, I guessed she was.

"I did the responsible thing, joining Team Magma," she began, and I felt a swell of anger rise in me. I kept it at bay behind furrowed brows. "Really, what were we going to do? We had nothing. This," she gestured to her soggy clothes. "this is something. This is security. This is what any responsible person in my position would have done, and you know it, James."

I squeezed my eyes shut and turned for the doorknob, but she jumped up, grabbing my wrist.

"Listen to me. This is the right decision for me," She paused, and I could hear her voice soften, "But none of this means anything without you around."

I spun around. "You didn't tell me a thing, Jessie!"

She took a step back, looking frustrated. "I know, I'm sorry. I should have said something more-"

"Great, you sure do sound sorry. This helps everything. Thanks, Jessie," I flung the door open. She leapt beside me and slammed it shut again.

"James, would you please just shut up for two seconds?"

My breaths were short and huffed. Her eyes flicked between mine as she searched for the next words.

"James, I'm here because I know that we are a team. Don't you get that?" I could tell how much the words pained her. It was clear that this was something that she meant. I had rarely seen Jessie so passionate, but my rage blinded me.

"Jessie, its too late."

"No, James, its not. Its not, and its never going to be for us. I know it, and you know it."

"Fifteen years, Jess-"

"I know! I know I hurt you, and I'm sorry, but don't you think this means something?"

I put my face in my hand, "-And it took you 24 hours to write me off-"

"James, what part of this aren't you getting?"

"-I never meant anything to-"

Cold, clammy hands met either side of my face, and she pulled me closer, in one swift movement bringing her icy lips to mine, kissing me furiously, and tearing away.

"Do you think that's nothing, James?"

I staggered, falling backward into one of the chairs. It screeched on the floor with an awful howl. She stopped, caught her breath, folded her arms. Silence followed for several seconds. I watched the carpet intensely.

She shrugged. "I don't know what else to say to you. All I know is that we are supposed to be together. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to figure that out, and I'm sorry that it had to happen this way. So if you want to fight what you know is true, then fine. Do it. And when you're ready to try this again, you let me know."

With that, she turned on a heel and made for the door, opening it and standing in the doorway. She turned to look back at me, where I sat panting in the chair. That's when I saw the facade crumble. The corners of her mouth turned upside-down, and her eyebrows knitted.

"Really, that's it? You're just going to let me walk out of here?" Her lips were quivering now. "I told you things would be okay, because I really thought they would be, James. I thought I knew you better than that."

And that was it. She walked out, and the door shut. I was angrier than I'd ever been. Who was she to think she could just walk back into my life? Who was she to think she was calling the shots in this? She wasn't right, not this time.

My mind was so sure that I could let her go now. This could be the closure I needed. Now she'd given me something to end the last fifteen years on: a terrible bitter argument.

But my heart knew it wasn't true. My heart knew that it was only half without Jessie. Without the one who had so unconditionally picked me up all those times. The one who had brushed away my tears, and told me time and time again that we would be alright. We would be alright. I knew, deep in my heart, we would be alright.

So my feet found their way racing down the stairs of the apartment building. My eyes found their sweet relief still only a short distance down the road, that beautiful red blaze illuminated in an orange streetlight. And my arms found their way around those familiar shoulders. I pressed her as close to me as I could bear, letting my head sink into her shoulder and the floodgate of tears finally burst. Her hands snaked possessively around my back, grabbing soaked jacket, shirt, and skin.

"I'm so sorry, James," she choked through tears, "I'm so sorry."

Maybe the rain hadn't been washing Jessie away, after all. Maybe the rain was washing away all of our bitter past, I realized, standing there with the woman I loved, feeling closer to her than I'd ever felt. Maybe the rain was the signal of the start of our new life together. It would take a long time for me to let those scars heal, but I knew in my heart of hearts that now, truly, we would be alright.


End file.
